{"id":5316,"date":"2021-01-21T06:00:00","date_gmt":"2021-01-21T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mechanicalmalarkey.com\/?p=5316"},"modified":"2021-01-21T06:00:00","modified_gmt":"2021-01-21T11:00:00","slug":"bolt-bending-ball-joint-tool","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mechanicalmalarkey.com\/index.php\/2021\/01\/21\/bolt-bending-ball-joint-tool\/","title":{"rendered":"Bolt-Bending Ball Joint Tool"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Several years ago, I bought a ball joint separator tool from Harbor Freight. It was the best $20 I’ve ever spent there. I don’t use it that frequently, but it works great. It’s finally failed on me, but not so badly that I can’t keep using it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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While attempting to get a stubborn ball joint to come free of a control arm, the pivot pin sheared. Despite not being the thinnest part of the tool, it makes sense for it to be the part that broke first.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The pin sheared at the part that contains the spring and ball that lock it in place, so it was the weakest part. While I can just go to Harbor Freight and pick up another of these tools, to keep working on the car at the time, I needed to replace the pin with something, and the obvious, most easily attainable solution, is a bolt. That’s when I learned a little more about bolts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The first bolt I grabbed was the same diameter as the original pin, and was an 8.8 rated metric bolt. I started using the tool, but before I was able to get the ball joint popped out, I noticed that the bolt was just bending. It’s the bolt in the middle in this picture. I replaced it with the bolt on the right, which is a 10.9 rated bolt, and as you can see, it didn’t bend at all. I knew that 10.9 bolts were stronger than 8.8, but I didn’t expect such a difference.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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-Dan<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Several years ago, I bought a ball joint separator tool from Harbor Freight. It was the best $20 I’ve ever spent there. I don’t use it that frequently, but it works great. It’s finally failed on me, but not so badly that I can’t keep using it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[63],"class_list":["post-5316","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-in-the-shop","tag-tools"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mechanicalmalarkey.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5316","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mechanicalmalarkey.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mechanicalmalarkey.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mechanicalmalarkey.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mechanicalmalarkey.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5316"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.mechanicalmalarkey.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5316\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mechanicalmalarkey.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5316"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mechanicalmalarkey.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5316"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mechanicalmalarkey.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5316"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}